Five Out: Kiki Iriafen's big night, South Carolina: destroyer of worlds, the Big 12's injury bug
Andrew's five thoughts on women's hoops. January 22nd, 2024.
I don’t envy the AP Top 25 voters this season. Usually it’s easy to take some shots at a ranking and believe you could do better with your placements. This season? Y’all can have it. So instead of power rankings or a ‘trending up, trending down’, I’m just gonna put out some thoughts on what I saw this weekend and we can chop it up in the comments.
1. South Carolina: *the* title contender until further notice.
I will freely admit up front: I wasn’t sure about Dawn Staley’s ability to do it again. When you have two generational bigs for multiple years in A’ja Wilson and Aliyah Boston, it’s entirely fair to ask if there will be a drop off when they leave. There was historical precedent. In the year between Wilson’s departure to the WNBA and Boston’s arrival, the Gamecocks went 23-10, finished 2nd in the SEC, lost to Arkansas in the conference tournament quarterfinals and were vaporized by national champion Baylor in the Sweet 16.
But Dawn is a different coach now than she was then and her program is the class of college basketball. Kamilla Cardoso is becoming the force that analysts thought she would be when she first transferred from Syracuse. Te-Hina Paopao is playing with an unparalleled joy and Milaysia Fulwiley looks like the next generational Gamecock to grace Colonial Life Arena. So far, South Carolina is 5-0 in conference play and is winning by an average margin of 32.6 points per game. The hardest matchup on the schedule (@ No. 9 LSU) is this weekend but at this point, doubt Dawn Staley at your own peril. Otherwise you’ll be writing mea culpa columns like yours truly.
2. Kiki Iriafen is here and Stanford feels back.
Stanford has played three AP Top 25 teams in their last four games, going 3-1 in that span with the one loss being a road tilt against No. 3 Colorado. In those games Kiki Iriafen has posted the following statlines…
vs. No .25 Oregon State: 36 points (16-26 FG), 12 rebounds.
vs. Oregon: 21 points (10-17 FG), 15 rebounds, 2 blocks.
@ No. 3 Colorado: 19 points (5-18 FG), 19 rebounds.
@ No. 16 Utah: 25 points (11-23 FG), 16 rebounds, 5 assists.
There’s no doubt about it anymore, Kiki is here. That 36-12 line came with Cameron Brink out with an injury and matched up against one of the better Pac-12 front courts in Oregon State. That the Cardinal can win without Brink (and with Hannah Jump having an off game vs. the Beavers) is indicative of their improvements from last year.
There are still questions about the guard spots and how they match up against the elite backcourts in women’s college basketball. But pound for pound Iriafen and Brink are the toughest front court in the nation and should be talked about as such. A big shoutout to Bob Nation too. Tara Vanderveer is now the winningest coach in NCAA basketball (men’s or women’s) history.
3. The Big 12 injury bug is brutal this year.
There’s plenty of discussion to be had about TCU’s roster constructions and the injury bug that hit them to the point of having to forfeit games. But the real story is just how bad injuries have been across the board this year. No. 4 Kansas State will have to contend with Ayoka Lee being out for four weeks. TCU’s season is irreversibly changed with Jaden Owens and Sedona Prince on the pine. Rori Harmon — a favorite of the No Cap Space crew — tore her ACL back in December. Kansas star Taiyanna Jackson suffered a head injury and apparently had multiple teeth knocked out over the weekend. That’s before we zoom out and talk UConn, Indiana, Ole Miss and Tennessee, who are all missing key contributors.
The entire complexion of the Big 12’s race and their top end ability has been severely hampered by injuries as we head into the end of January. That’s brutal given how interesting the league was shaping up to be just 10 days ago. What’s worse is most of the injuries are season enders so we don’t even get a chance at seeing some of these players in March. To summarize, injuries suck. Full stop.
4. Is the Pac-12 in danger of cannibalization?
Coming into conference play, there was a firm belief in a nine bid Pac-12. Shoot, I was beating that drum last week! But there is something strange happening out on the west coast. Cannibalization is happening to a degree that I’m starting to wonder what the final bid number will look like. At this point, six teams are guaranteed to make an appearance. Things would have to go really bad for the group of teams starting with UCLA and ending with Oregon State to get clipped out of the field of 68.
But the next tier of Washington, Cal, Washington State and Arizona are all carrying major question marks. The Huskies dropped a game to Arizona State, a bad NCAA NET loss. Arizona did the same at the hands of Oregon last week. The Ducks can stay competitive in the conference but with three double digit blowout losses to mid major teams, they are poison to other teams and their tournament hopes.
The parity has made for one of the most compelling conference races in America this year. It gives me a lot of faith that a national champion or — at the very least — multiple Final Four contenders exist out west. But tourney bids are also an indicator of conference depth and if the bottom-of-the-table upsets keep happening, we may have to re-assess just how deep the Pac-12’s talent goes.
5. The ACC continues to confound us all…
While the Pac-12 cannibalizes, so too does the ACC. But unlike the Pac’s top heavy rankings, the ACC is dispersed pretty evenly throughout the AP Top 25 this week. Personally, I have no clue how to assess them. NC State is the class of the league right now but holds a pretty bad loss to Miami (albeit on the road). And let’s be real: are *you* trusting a Wes Moore team in March? Syracuse is back in the Top 25, Florida State just got upset by Virginia, North Carolina hasn’t looked particularly impressive, while Jeff Walz continues to get away with it at Louisville (and I mean that as a compliment).
We thought the same thing about the Atlantic last year, mind you. “A lot of good teams that will probably lose in the second weekend.” And then they turned around and had arguably the most successful tournament along with the SEC. March comes down to back court defense and good shooting nights and the ACC has plenty of teams that can accomplish that. But I’m at a loss for how to evaluate them in the regular season without a top end non-NC State team. Maybe if Notre Dame hadn’t opened the year with a blowout loss to South Carolina the narrative is different? But for now, they are the conference of “don’t prognosticate, just watch ball.”
A side note on court storming:
You really thought you were getting out of here without some Caitlin Clark dialogue? I think not! Ohio State’s big upset over Iowa was marred by a video of the Hawkeyes star guard colliding with a Buckeye fan storming the court. A different angle of the clip added an entirely different layer of “did Clark see the student?” “did she flop?” “did she extend arms?” etc.
I personally don’t think the clip is particularly generous to Clark. At the end of the day, it looks like two people who didn’t see each other running into one another. Ascribing malicious intent to either seems like an exercise in having a narrative and running with it. But it does open up a particular note about court storming and its’ utility in today’s sports world.
I am an ardent proponent of the storm. I confess upfront. I believe sports are about community. And collective moments, like a court storm, matter in a society increasingly obsessed with individualistic achievement. BUT! You need to keep the student-athletes safe. Here’s a potential idea: make the storm a moment. A tradition. You force the crowd to wait, build up the anticipation, give opposing teams the ability to leave the floor and then let the gates open and go. It doesn’t fix the concern of crowd crushes but it seems like the discussion is more about student-athlete safety than the safety of students at this very moment.
Of all the videos we’ve seen of court/field storming gone wrong, I’m not sure the Clark incident registers high enough on the scale to even open up the broader discussion. At the same time, there’s two sides to each argument and both have merit. Let’s just not run with the narratives. At least until Rex Chapman steals someone’s video to make a Block or Charge tweet.